Till Divorce Do Us Part

When Pilar Jiménez wed in 1961, she knew her marriage would last. “Back then, no one separated,” says the 71-year-old Salamanca resident. “Marriage was for life.” Indeed, her union — like most that took place in the strongly Catholic environment of Franco’s Spain — endured, lasting until her husband’s death two years ago. But if her marriage was typical of its era, so too are those of her 10 children: five of them are now divorced.

That’s about average in Spain these days. The rate of broken marriages has risen steadily since Spain legalized divorce in 1981. But a 2005 reform that removed such obstacles as a 
 mandatory year-long separation prior to the granting of a divorce has caused those numbers to skyrocket. Spain now has one divorce for every 2.3 marriages — an increase of 74% in the past two years alone.

“Divorce may be a sin, but if the marriage is hell, why would you stay?” asks Jiménez’s son César Borrego, a 35-year-old pilot who divorced his wife in 2006 after eight years of marriage. It was a contentious divorce — the couple have two children and César sued for shared custody — but less difficult in some ways than that of his older brother Kiko, a military flight mechanic who split up with his wife in 1992 after only three months of marriage. “Because of the law then we had to wait until we had been married a year before we could even file for separation,” Kiko recalls, “and we had to wait another year until we could file for divorce.”

For the Catholic Church, the dramatic increase in Spain’s divorce rate underlines the moral threat it perceives from Zapatero’s government. At a December rally in Madrid to “defend the Christian family,” 
 Cardinal Augustín 
 García-Gasco lambasted Socialist initiatives, 
 saying, “The culture of radical laicism … leads to nothing but despair along the road of 
 abortion and express divorce.” Benigno Blanco, president of the Spanish Forum for the Family, agrees: “The reform has transformed the marriage contract into trash. It’s banalized marriage.”

Certainly, Spaniards no longer seem scandalized by the prospect of divorce. Alberto Rubio founded divorcioexpress.com, a website that, for less than $600, lets partners seal an uncontested divorce via the Internet. “We facilitate about 100 divorces a month,” he says. “But we’re not promoting divorce, just making it more accessible.” Like him, sociologist Inés Alberdi sees little grounds for concern over the divorce boom. “The number of divorces may have climbed, but the number of separations has decreased by almost the same amount,” she says. “Before, when it came to divorce, Spain had very strange practices. Now we’re more like other countries in Europe.”

For Jiménez, there is no doubt that some old values have been lost. In the past, she says, “family was always the most important thing. It would never have entered my mind to separate.” Still, thanks to her children, she’s become more accustomed to the idea of divorce. “They’re adults,” she says. “If two people are unhappy, why should they have to suffer?”